[PaulHoule]

Years ago I was interested in agents that used "old AI" symbolic techniques backed up with classical machine learning. I kept getting hired though by people who were working on pre-transformer neural nets for texts.

Something I knew all along was that you build the system that lets you do it with the human in the loop, collect evaluation and training data [1] and then build a system which can do some of the work and possibly improve the quality of the rest of it.

[1] in that order because for any 'subjective' task you will need to evaluate the symbolic system even if you don't need to train it -- if you need to train the system, on the other hand, you'll still need to eval